The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Example approaches for renting items are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,584,450 B1 and 7,024,381 B1, the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein. Mailer envelopes useful in the rental approaches are described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,966,484 B2, the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein. Rental inventory approaches are described in US Patent Publication No. 20050086127, the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein.
The approaches of the '450 patent and '381 patent can be applied to renting disc media such as DVDs, using a rental system in which a plurality of distribution locations (“hubs”) store an inventory of disc media. In one such approach, for systems or management of the hubs to know if a particular disc needs to ship or not, the hubs scan bar codes on all the discs that the hubs have in stock. The scanning operation includes discs returned from customer homes the same day as part of a Rental Return process, and all discs in a SAT (Scan Again Tomorrow) Sorting process that were left over from the night before. This process requires scanning a very large number of discs, causing SAT Sorting to become a bottleneck within the hub process.